...I have no data to back this up, and I doubt if it could be established statistically anyway...is that the long-established family kids are just too lazy and too greedy and too uninterested in anything to go after careers in what they really like, or in areas where they feel their hard-won expertise will translate into an economic advantage. They opt instead for the low-effort, high-payoff areas like business, or the artsy fartsy stuff, or the fuzzy behavioral sciences fields. It gets them a sheepskin and out of the drudgery of classes and homework so they can concentrate on beer, broads and football.

Don't get me wrong, I have no quarrel with these areas of knowledge, and I am putting no one down just because they don't learn hard stuff like calculus and physics. Indeed, if I had to do it over again, I'd read either classics or music or languages, because my interests have changed, but at least I still have genuine interests. The wholesale abandonment of more rigorous studies for lunatic disciplines like Communications, Real Estate Investment Counseling or Black Women's Studies Education tells me college is now a rite of passage designed to open your doors socially, or allow you access to some incestuous academic closed cycle of regurgitated and pre-digested BS, not provide an intellectual challenge that ALSO might translate into a useful and productive career.

A major in the sciences or math, and even engineering, is today considered strictly for grinds and uncool people. Engineers often only see their fields as an entry into the world of management. The guys who love to actually make things are often looked down upon by their more management-oriented colleagues as naive and socially inept geeks.

Well, whether I've got it pegged or not, something disturbing is going on when every year more and more of our technical expertise has to be handed off to foreigners, or the children of immigrants, and when our more acculturated youngsters seem to have accumulated such a collective disdain for what, in my opinion, is one of the most profoundly intellectual and rewarding branches of human activity: a profound desire to understand how this marvelous universe of ours works.

Just look at those names. I salute those kids, more power and best of luck to them, but I sure wish I saw a few more familiar surnames there.

End of rant.